Nerval's Lobster writes: "Hackathons are not exactly uncommon things, whether the programmers are assembled to improve a company product or simply to tackle a particular challenge. Few of them, however, offer the chance to hack the human brain. That was the reason behind the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Brain Science’s week-long hackathon: give 30 participants from various universities and institutes, along with a smattering of technology companies, the chance to develop data-analysis tools based on the latest version of the Institute’s Allen Brain Atlas API, which was released earlier in June.

Projects and applications included that crunched a list of genes to discover disease patterns. Another translated genomic data into music—because when it comes to data-crunching and neuroscience, you can’t be deadly serious all the time."